A Laughable Experience with an O2O Product

This is a true story about an O2O (Online-to-Offline) product. Although I am deeply interested in the O2O space myself, logic and sanity always prevail in the end.

It concerns a domestic cleaning O2O service whose name I won’t mention; let’s call it AppX for now. I first heard of AppX during a conversation with a friend about O2O. It felt like a true disruption to the traditional offline housekeeping industry. Driven by this curiosity, I decided to try AppX for the first time. My use case was simple: hiring an hourly cleaner to tidy up my place.

I registered, logged in, entered my address, and the system recommended several cleaners. I chose one with excellent reviews and booked a slot. Since it was after business hours, the app didn’t show any immediate updates. The next morning, I received a call from customer service confirming the booking. After double-checking the details, the agent dropped the critical question: “If the cleaner you selected isn’t available, would it be alright to assign someone else?” I didn’t think much of it and agreed.

Sure enough, that call was a foreshadowing. The cleaner I had handpicked was swapped out, and my booking details changed. At first, I didn’t think it was a big deal, but when I casually tapped into the new cleaner’s profile, I was greeted by a flood of negative reviews. My immediate reaction was that this was sketchy. I called customer service twice to voice my concerns, specifically pointing out, “This is my first time using AppX, and I really want to have a good experience so that I can keep using it in the future.” However, the eventual delayed response from customer service was: “Either take this cleaner or cancel the order.” I was utterly speechless. Having worked on O2O projects myself, I know this is the nightmare scenario that any O2O team would desperately want to avoid. Yet, against all odds, it happened.

When I shared this story with my friend, he burst out laughing. Thinking about it, it really is comical. You open a restaurant, welcome me inside with open arms, brag about all your delicious food, only for me to find out that everything I want to order is sold out. Finally, you tell me that the only thing left is a notoriously terrible dish that everyone hates, and ask me: “Do you want to eat it or not?”

Here are a few key takeaways from my personal experience:

1. Are you actually ready?

Actually, I shouldn’t even ask this question, because modern founders always focus on sweet-talking investors first before doing any actual work. More often than not, what they end up building is completely different from what they originally pitched. Clearly, AppX was not ready to serve its customers, because all the ‘good food’ in the shop was already sold out.

2. People from pure internet product backgrounds are inherently unfit for O2O

Some might find this assertion a bit too extreme, but my experience tells me that people from internet product backgrounds spend most of their time inventing fake demands and trying to ‘educate’ users. Because the internet itself doesn’t possess intrinsic physical value, pure internet product managers are used to doing whatever it takes to acquire users first, and then teach them how to play. O2O, however, is about using the internet as a tool to accelerate traditional offline industries. Its essence is internet-channel marketing for traditional brick-and-mortar operations. In my case, it manifested as: “You are about to order a poorly-reviewed dish, would you like to eat it?” Since the internet is supposed to be a low-cost, high-efficiency tool, why on earth would I force myself to eat that? I can easily switch to another restaurant!

3. All bubbles will eventually pop

Although there are still people leveraging whatever buzzwords investors love to secure a free meal, they are already becoming a minority. The more efficient a tool is, the faster it weeds out the superficial. Ultimately, someone has to foot the bill. The investors? Sure, but they have plenty of cash to burn. The biggest loss, in fact, is the user group’s willingness to ever use the service again. People in China have been burned by too many scams and gimmicks, so the public quickly develops immunity. A crisis of trust cannot be resolved overnight, and in the end, this behavior severely damages user confidence across the entire industry.

I don’t deny the reality of industries surviving purely on fundraising; that’s what Wall Street has taught everyone, and there’s no way around it. However, any product that does not start from reality, lacks solid execution, and is built on top of fake demands should be swiftly eliminated.